The material body is a vehicle which you are temporarily in and temporarily using. There are many examples which can help you understand that you're not the body. For example, you can ask yourself the question, "Am I my hand?" And then you can ask yourself that if your hand was sitting on the other side of the room because it got cut off by a sword or it fell off on your way to work or something, would you be where the hand is or would you be where YOU are looking at the hand?

A materialist holds to the concept, theory, that there is only one energy that exists, and that is matter. And so when he comes to questions such as "What is consciousness? What is awareness? What is life?", he concludes that it also must have some chemical basis. It's either chemical in substance or somehow it's an offspring of the complex chemical arrangements that are there in the brain and the rest of the body. So basically, in materialistic civilization, we've come to the conclusion that life itself is really nothing more than this offspring of matter.

I mean if somebody tells me that life was created a certain amount of time ago, some billions and millions and millions and millions of years ago by the combination of chemicals, if they tell me this then I take it for granted that they know what it is that was created. If somebody says that life was created ten thousand million years ago then I take it for granted that they know what they are talking about when they use the word "life."